Ryan Mickle Blogs Here

Author, entrepreneur, Princeton University guest-lecturer, and world traveler, Tim Ferriss, is helping the world begin living the lives they always dreamed about right now, with his book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. In the book (out on Tuesday, April 24th), Tim teaches readers to use proven techniques to automate the most time-consuming, income-generating activities in their lives to create the time and means necessary to begin actually living their wildest adventures. Most people don’t even know what they would do with the hundreds of hours in each month that they would free by implementing these techniques, and what is scary is that work typically expands with time allotted. Therefore, the time we typically free for ourselves gets filled with additional and often unproductive work. Ever tried to check your email for 2 minutes and finally pull away from your computer an hour later? The solution–lifestyle design. By designing lifestyles for ourselves that serve our personal passions, determining the requirements of these lifestyles (both time and money–it’s always cheaper than you would think), and actually scheduling in the activities of which we only dream today (like months of world travel, learning new languages, launching a volunteer organization to address a significant social need, etc.), it is all entirely possible.

This book will change the way you think about living. Buy the book and, as you wait for it to arrive, begin brainstorming about all the adventures and life experiences that you would seek out with the time and financial means that the book teaches readers to create.

One tip from Tim’s blog, to wet your appetite:

How to Check E-mail Twice a Day… or Once Every 10 Days

E-mail (and all of its Crackberry/digital leash/Twitter cousins) is the largest single interruption in modern life. In a digital world, creating time therefore hinges on minimizing e-mail. The fastest method I’ve found for controlling the e-mail impulse is to set up an autoresponder that indicates you will be checking e-mail twice per day or less. This is an example of “batching” tasks (performing like tasks at set times, between which you let them accumulate), and your success with batching will depend on two factors:

1. Your ability to train others to respect these intervals
and, much more difficult,
2. Your ability to discipline yourself to follow your own rules

Buy the book cheap here (under $13 for a hardcover, affordable even for bootstrapping entrepreneurs):

Overstock ($12.89 + 2.95 shipping)
Amazon (13.57 + 3.99 shipping, or free shipping on 2 copies)

Or pre-order it at your local book store (supplies will be very limited at bookstores, initially), here are some great Bay Area locations:

Stacey’s, 581 Market St. San Francisco, CA 94105. (415) 421-4687
Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera. (415) 927-0960
Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710. (510) 559-9500
Kepler’s, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park. (650) 324-4321

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 11:09 am and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.